Tag Archives: personal cloud

The cloud has certainly grabbed the attention of both big business and the typical consumer, but the technology’s impact may signal the end of the PC as we know it. Research firm Gartner believes the personal cloud will replace the PC as the center of our digital lives sooner than you might think: 2014.

“Major trends in client computing have shifted the market away from a focus on personal computers to a broader device perspective that includes smartphones, tablets and other consumer devices,” Steve Kleynhans, research vice president at Gartner, said in a statement. “Emerging cloud services will become the glue that connects the Web of devices that users choose to access during the different aspects of their daily life.”

“People argue about, ‘Are we in a post-PC world?’ Why are we arguing? Of course we are in a post-PC world,” Ozzie said at a recent GeekWire-sponsored conference. “That doesn’t mean the PC dies; that just means that the scenarios that we use them in, we stop referring to them as PCs, we refer to them as other things.”

And You Thought Your Utility Bills Were High

How many servers does it take to power Amazon’s huge cloud computing operation? Like most large Internet
companies, Amazon doesn’t disclose such details. But a researcher estimates that Amazon Web Services is using at least 454,400 servers in seven data center hubs around the globe, according to a post at Data Center Knowledge.

Huan Liu, a research manager at Accenture Technology Labs, analyzed Amazon’s EC2 compute service using internal and external IP addresses, which he extrapolated to come up with estimates for the number of racks in each data center location. Liu then applied an assumption of 64 blade servers per rack – four 10U chassis, each holding eight blades – to arrive at the estimate.

Liu’s estimate is bound to generate some debate. But it provides an additional point of reference for Amazon’s scale, along with earlier analyses. It clearly places the size of Amazon’s structure well above the hosting providers that have publicly disclosed their server counts, but still well below the estimated 900,000 servers in Google’s data center network.

Cloud Hunts for the Origins of the Universe

When your day job is figuring out the workings of the universe you need some heavy duty computing power at your disposal.

That’s why researchers at CERN, the Swiss research lab that is home to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator, are dialing up additional muscle from the cloud, according to ZDNet.

CERN is taking part in the Helix Nebula initiative, a pilot project designed to kick start the European cloud computing industry by carrying out scientific research in the cloud.

“On the CERN site we can’t increase the size of our data center much more. Two or three years down the line we’re going to be limited by space and by electrical consumption. We have to think of what other options are open to us and the on-demand, elastic cloud computing provided by a number of these companies seems like a very good option for us to explore,” said Bob Jones, CERN’s head of openlab, the public-private partnership that helps CERN identify new IT that could benefit the lab.

CERN’s mission is to answer fundamental questions such as “What is the origin of mass?” Heavy stuff.